Goyokin

Paul continues his impassioned one-paragraph film reviews going over at Paragraph Film Reviews with his JAPAN-O-RAMA series. He’s allowed moi to take a guest look at one of the finest samurai films of the late 60s. One that has a direct connection with today’s Friday Forgotten Film. I hope you check out his site and this series.

Goyokin (御用金 Goyōkin, also called Official Gold or Steel Edge of Revenge) (1969), directed by Hideo Gosha, starts so unexpectedly for what ‘chambara‘ (sword-fighting) genre fans would expect, viewers must think they’re in another movie. Imagine Alfred Hitchcock transporting the whole of Bodega Bay across the Pacific, planting them down onto another seashore town, only to have them discover their old friend, genus Corvus, waiting to finish them off…in Japanese. Make no mistake; this is a samurai…